[waimea] Waimea running quite slow..

[David Reveman]

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 00:43 +0100, Eoin Hennessy wrote:
> I'm using the latest cvs waimea, and on my system it's running very
> slow. The machine's a p3 800mhz with 256mb of RAM. I'm running a
> barebones slackware 9.1 installation (without gnome/kde bloat). I'm
> using the latest xorg X server on an nVidia FX5600 with the latest
> nvidia drivers.

Should be fine.

> 
> Waimea is usable, but some actions are painfully slow, such as
> initialisation, window resizing, scrolling and shading. I have a
> feeling things should be running quicker.

Well, waimea is a little bit ahead of it's time, the cairo library used
for all rendering is under heavy development and it's not optimized for
speed yet. In the future cairo will be a lot faster, especially when we
get an xserver, which will accelerate all rendering operations used by
cairo.

Rendering operations have low priority in waimea. This is good as we
don't spend an awful lot of time performing rendering operations when we
got more important stuff to do, like processing input events. However,
this can make it look like waimea is slow, but that might not be the
case. Threading will make this a lot better but that's kind of buggy
right now.

> 
> I've heard that nvidias xrender support is poor, could this be the
> cause? Are their tests I could carry out to pinpoint the bottleneck?

They have the best render support as far as I know. Make sure you've
turned it on. This should be in the Device section in your xorg.conf:

Option "RenderAccel" "True"
 
-David